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Darcy flinched as if he had been struck.

“I know it,” said the Colonel, putting up both his hands. “I am her guardian, too. I have never forgotten it for a minute. I am not asking you to put her name in a newspaper. I am asking you to understand the difference between protecting a person and withholding a fact that would stop another person from being hurt. They have been the same thing for so long that you cannot see where the one stops and the other begins. Think of that, of Miss Bennet, and the younger sisters you told me of. Think of a house full of girls in a militia town.”

The thought struck Darcy slowly. He had thought of it before. He had thought of it at Netherfield, in a corner, with a glass of wine in his hand, watching a lieutenant in scarlet make himself agreeable to a girl of fifteen; and had thought, it is not my affair, and had turned his shoulder and gone back to the card-table. He got up. He walked to the window, and stood looking out at nothing, at the black shape of the avenue and the stars above it, with his hands braced on the sill.

“I do not owe her an account,” he said at last. He paused, and then added. “I do not owe anybody an account.”

The Colonel agreed. “No, you do not.”

“I have done nothing in this affair of which I am ashamed.” Darcy looked at his cousin and said it rather directly.

“Tell her that, then,” urged the Colonel. “Tell her what happened, and what can be proved. Do not ask her to believe you. Only give her the facts, and leave the rest to the facts.”

Darcy was silent for so long that the Colonel began to think he had lost him. Then he said, very low, to the glass. “It began with a dog.”

The story took Darcy until nearly four, and the Colonel did not once interrupt. He told it gravely; and the Colonel, who had heard a good many men tell a good many hard stories, listened with his hands hanging between his knees and thought that he had never in his life heard anything so terrible told so quietly.

Darcy spoke of a boy of twelve, the steward’s son, golden, laughing, who had drowned a spaniel in the Pemberley pond for the pleasure of seeing it struggle, and been forgiven, because he wept. There was Cambridge, and the debts, and the first small lies; and the living, which Darcy’s father in his will had recommended in terms Darcy had thought, even then, were more generous than wise. There was the day the man had written to say that he had no wish to take orders and would prefer three thousand pounds, and the day he had come back from town, bright-eyed, three months later, penniless, for the first time. And again. And again. Fitzwilliam knew some of it, having visited often as a boy, but he had not known all of it, until that sitting.

And then, there was the morning at Ramsgate.

“I went down unannounced,” said Darcy. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his clenched hands before his mouth, and he spoke into them. “I had a sense. I had been assured that Mrs. Younge was a respectful governance.” He shook his head soberly and snickered. “And then, I found Georgiana in tears and Wickham on the sofa with his boots off.” Darcy put both hands to his eyes. “I put him against the wall and took him by the throat, and I held him there, and I watched him go on smiling, and I thought, I shall kill him. I thought about it. I really did. And I could hear her in the next room sobbing.” Darcy exhaled; the recalling of the memories was painful. He had told bits and pieces to Fitzwilliam, but not in its entirety.

Darcy continued, his voice had gone quite hoarse. “And then the bastard went. Quietly. He did not even trouble to be afraid. He knew I could not do anything, because anything I did would be known.” Darcy shook his head again. “He has always known. Everything I do to him costs her more than it costs him, and he is quite aware of it. And so I let him walk away, and the next quarter-day I sent his creditors a hundred pounds, and I have been paying him in silence ever since.”

The fire had gone out. Neither of them moved to mend it.

The Colonel said, “She was fifteen. She was fifteen years old, and she thought he loved her.”

The Colonel put out a hand and laid it, briefly, hard, on his cousin’s shoulder. He took it away again. They had never been men who could do much more. He took a deep breadth in and then said, “Write it down, Fitz. Write down everything that can be proved. The draft for the three thousand, with the date. The attorney’s receipt. The letters he wrote when the second living was refused, which you still have, God help us, in the box with the Pemberley deeds. Give her the names of the people she can write to. Give her me, if you like; I will swear to any of it. And as for Georgiana.”

Darcy’s head shot up. “I cannot put Georgiana in a letter to a woman I have no right to write to.”

The Colonel looked at him directly. “You can put in the fact, without the name. She is my ward as well as yours, and I tell you it is wanted. Let Miss Bennet decide what she will do with it. I think she will do nothing but keep it. I think she is that sort.”

And then, Richard rose, and stretched, and looked down at his cousin with the weary lopsided affection of long habit. “Go to bed, Fitz. Do it in the morning.” He began to walk towards the door, then stopped and turned, And Fitz...”

“What?” Darcy asked.

“Do not tell her what you hoped she would think of it. I mean it. Not one word.” The Colonel was firm, and then he turned back towards the door and walked out.

***

The news came to Elizabeth the next afternoon in the form of a long letter, crossed on the second page, in her aunt Phillips’s round and breathless hand.

She read it in the parsonage garden, under the pear tree, with a book open on her knee as a pretence. There was a great deal about the militia, and a ball, and the new bonnets at Meryton; and then, tucked in among the bonnets like a thorn in a posy, a paragraph she had to read twice.

You will be amazed to hear, my dear Lizzy, that Mr. Wickham, who was so very attentive to you in the winter, is now, if I may say so, entirely devoted to Miss King.

You remember Miss King, with the squint, whose grandfather died so fortunate for her, and left ten thousand pounds. Everybody says it is quite a match, and that he has been seen at her door three times in the week.

It is so pleasant to think of him settled, though your mother’s opinion, you know, is that there was no great constancy in it.

Elizabeth took a breath and put the letter down. She found that her hands were quite cold. She sat very still, under the white drift of blossom, and looked at the garden path, and let the thing arrange itself. Ten thousand pounds. He had told her he despised the mercenary; that he had been ill-used for want of a fortune and would rather die than marry for one. He had said it in her aunt’s drawing-room with his candid eyes on her face, and she had believed him, because every word he said had seemed to fit with every other.

She thought it fitted with Miss King and that was the dreadful part; it fits with Miss King exactly.

She considered the matter with all caution. Elizabeth did not like to be shaken, and it was the Colonel’s word against Wickham’s, and the Colonel was Darcy’s cousin, and had, by his own admission, every motive to wish his cousin well thought of. She had said so to herself a dozen times since the evening in the parsonage. But a man who tells a falsehood about his cousin’s money would be hard put to tell a falsehood about his own. And here, on the second page of her aunt’s letter, was a fact that no one had had any reason to arrange.